Mobile robots are becoming increasingly commonplace and are used in such diverse fields as space exploration, lawn mowing and floor cleaning. The last decade has seen particularly rapid advancement in the field of robotic floor cleaning devices, especially vacuum cleaners, the primary objective of which is to navigate a user's home autonomously and unobtrusively whilst cleaning the floor.
In performing this task, a robotic vacuum cleaner has to navigate the area which it is required to clean and to avoid colliding with obstacles whilst doing so. A requirement for a robotic vacuum cleaner when exploring a room is to clean as close as possible up to the edges of a room. One approach to this is shown in U.S. Pat. No. 6,883,201 which equips a circular-bodied robotic floor cleaner with spinning side brushes on each of its forward flanks in order to brush debris into the path of a horizontally mounted brush bar exposed on the underside of the device and between its wheels. Such a system of opposed spinning brushes can result in debris being flicked away from the front of the device which reduces the effectiveness of this approach for cleaning the edges of a room.